Receiving 3rd party webhooks on a locally hosted web app

I spent today integrating Paddle into Readership. Readership isn’t hosted anywhere publicly available yet, so I needed a way to feed Paddle’s webhooks to a URL on localhost.

Enter UltraHook. Having used it for a few hours, I really can’t fault it. It’s lightweight, it’s stable and it just works.

Getting up and running is a 3 step process if you already have Ruby installed:

1​. Install it:

$ gem install ultrahook

2​. Configure it (you get an API key when you sign up):

$ echo "api_key: YOUR_API_KEY" > ~/.ultrahook

3​. Run it:

$ ultrahook paddle-alerts 8888/api/v1/paddle/alerts/new

The command in step 3 tells UltraHook to listen for webhooks POSTed to http://paddle-alerts.USERNAME.ultrahook.com and forward them to localhost:8888/api/v1/paddle/alerts/new on your machine. All that’s left to do is to tell the service you’re receiving webhooks from to send them to the generated ultrahook.com URL.

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